Deadlift: Fixing your lockout

Misdiagnosis in lifting happens ALL the time.

“You keep missing your deadlift at lockout? Your glutes MUST BE WEAK! Go and do 6 weeks of block pulls/glute bridges/[insert magic flavour of the month assistance movement here]. Thank me for the bunda later”.

Great. Your glutes are now probably stronger/thiccer.
You come back to deadlifts renewed in confidence, cheeked up and ready to pull some big numbers….

But low and behold:
Same breakdown.
Same result.
You’ve just wasted a training block not getting any better at deadlifting.

Building and strengthening individual muscle IS important.
But without integrating those new gains back into the system as a whole and focusing on movement skill, we’ll often run into the same problems.

In the case of a missed deadlift lockout, the culprit is usually going to come back to a loss of starting position off the floor:
>The lifter has not sufficiently developed the skill of maintaining tension through their torso;
> the upper back moves through flexion;
> and the hips are left in a worse position to contribute (all that time working on those glutes, only for them to get turned away at the door).

The fix?

We can index exercise selection for either develop ‘output’ or ‘skill’.

Having identified a skill issue, we can then go to our ‘skill’ exercise index and select for ‘maintaining start position’. Concentric tempos are our go-to at Jungle.